


I am Human.

by DarthSuki



Category: Daft Punk
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Gen, M/M, becoming human, ends happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-03-06
Packaged: 2018-01-14 18:58:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1277329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarthSuki/pseuds/DarthSuki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The feeling of being limitless and then finally limited is not easy to describe. It is slow as much as it is sudden, as blissful as it is painful. It is as if the tendrils of empty existence release their grip, one by one of the billion that exist and yet do not. You fall into life slowly, so slowly, until it is all you know and understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I am Human.

I cannot remember my name.

I am not alive.

I am not human.

There’s nothing around me, and yet I feel like it’s all pushing down, surrounding me, suffocating me. My optics are gone, and my systems are quiet. My hands cannot move, and my processors are distorted. There is nothing. There is absolutely nothing. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to feel but emptiness.

And I am very scared.

Memories are unglued and I can’t hold them down. Who am I? Where am I? How long have I been here? The questions play over and over in whatever I manage to call a mind, because every time I ask them I forget that I had even begun to ask them in the first place. I can’t think, mind stretched and scattered across an eternity of existence in the smallest and emptiest of space.

I’m so scared.

What am I? 

I can’t remember. I can’t remember who I am, I can’t remember anything at all. I’m sleeping in this vast pool of emptiness and eternity and no matter what happens, I don’t want to wake up.

It is the only thing that I remember, if there ever was or has been a time outside of this empty eternity: I don’t want to wake up.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been here. There is no concept of time or place, of self or space. It simply all is, and yet at the same time, is not. 

I think I’m dead. 

I wasn’t supposed to have a soul. I cannot remember why, cannot recall how, but I know I wasn’t supposed to be here. I wasn’t supposed to have a soul.

I’m very, very scared.

It is an eternity before, and an eternity beyond, but the questions remain with me. My mind is a cycle, continuing from the beginning when I’ve forgotten that I had started. I am content with this, and I am also frightened. I am frightened of the eternity before me, and I am frightened of who I was before this eternity began. 

The cycle breaks.

It is as if there is suddenly everything surrounding me. I can feel it, I can taste it, I can hear and smell it. Existence is so sudden, pooling into every ounce of my being, taking shape, giving me limbs and ears and eyes and a mouth. It gives me meaning, a memory, and suddenly things are focused and full. Emptiness is surrounded by fullness, the pressure of existing and the feeling of being. 

Suddenly, I live.

The eternity is no longer forever in time and space, but beautifully limited to that of what I can think that feel. It is limited to the pressure of a bed beneath my back, and the sounds of voices mere steps away from me. It’s limited to the shaking of my fingers on the sheets, and the smell of flowers and perfume that caresses across my face, greeting me to an existence I had never once questioned in the eternity I had been apart of before.

The feeling of being limitless and then finally limited is not easy to describe. It is slow as much as it is sudden, as blissful as it is painful. It is as if the tendrils of empty existence release their grip, one by one of the billion that exist and yet do not. You fall into life slowly, so slowly, until it is all you know and understand. 

I was a soul, and and now I live. I’ve filled up every space and every thought, and at last I can feel it. I can feel that I live. 

I can feel a sound within me. It sits there, dull, rhythmic, a different sound than what I suspect I was familiar with before my existence in eternity.

Thump...Thump...Thump...Thump…

It is deep and full. I can feel its very beat quaking through my limbs, through my mind and chest. It makes me panic and feel relieved at once, the foreign part of my being the most vivid and welcomed aspect to my new existence. It slowly fills me with life, the understanding that I am here and I am alive, laying in a bed and hearing voices and smelling flowers. I am feeling the breeze of the air caressing across my face, feeling my chest rise and fall and fill with air like a waterfall.

The memories are muddled. They are there in my head, and organized into the chronological order that eternity never once allowed, but fuzzy beyond understanding. I don’t even understand what they are at first. I don’t even understand why I have them, why I can think, and why I can feel. I understand nothing, but I know I am alive, and I am still very, very afraid.

I’m afraid now because I can feel confusion. I can feel it slowly crawling through me, a far slower sensation than life or existence, taking hold of every ounce of me until I’m nothing more than a single question:

Who am I?

I see darkness, at first. I see darkness and don’t understand why, because I can smell and hear and feel everything else--I know I exist at last. I don’t understand. I am alive. I am alive.

I AM ALIVE.

Anger. Anger and confusion. It swells in my throat as a lump, in front of my eyes as liquid, and I can’t stop letting that thought roll through my head. This time, I don’t forget that I’m thinking about it. This time, every complete cycle makes it stronger, until finally the voice of thought in my head isn’t anymore, and instead I can hear it. 

It drowns out the sound of the others, the darkness finally being empty with things save for my fingers clenching the sheets below me, and the breeze still caressing my face with it’s soft and sweet scent. My face is cold from the breeze, only because my cheeks are suddenly wet. 

I AM ALIVE. I AM ALIVE. I AM ALIVE.

It is like a broken record skipping on itself. It is a glitch of a computer, repeating over and over.

There’s pain. There’s pain in my hands, in my fingers clenching the sheets. I can feel the ache of their use, the strain of it all. My chest is rising, sucking in more and more air for my words. I need air, more air, never enough air. I exist and breath and feel. I need more air. I need to feel it, need to have it, need to keep it.

I AM ALIVE. I AM ALIVE. I AM ALIVE.

The heart within me quickens, the sound of it’s thumping pulsing through my entire being. I can feel it, thumping like a deep, foreboding drum beat. It dictates everything, it composes everything, like a song. It counts the rhythm of my existence and controls the speed of my mantra of words. My breath is started to be broken, cut off by the need to stop, the need to sob.

I AM ALIVE. I AM ALIVE. I AM ALIVE.

And suddenly.

I can see.

It’s so bright. It’s so bright and painful, I can’t see anything besides white. For a moment I look, vision filled with things. There’s color and things, there’s existence surrounding me. My body is struck silent of everything as my mind processes this, seeming to take an eternity itself just to understand that I am seeing. 

I am seeing. 

My fingers slowly relax. The rising and falling of my chest slows, as does the heart within it. I flicker my gaze from one thing to another in a blur of confusion and realization. I exist. I live. 

There’s someone talking. I can’t understand what it is, but it’s louder than what I had been hearing before. It takes me some time to realize how to move anything other than my hands or chest to look, pain shooting through the center of my body from the mere movement, but I don’t care. I can feel pain. I can actually, really feel pain. 

The voice is a lot closer than I assumed. In fact, it’s right next to me. It’s holding my face. It’s right next to my face.

I look at the voice for a few moments, taking in the contours of cheeks, eyes, jaw and shoulders. I let it process in layers until they finally stick together. The voice is a person. The voice is a human.

And this human is speaking to me. Its caressing my face and--oh, that wasn’t the breeze I had assumed. It was this human’s fingers, holding each side of my face and caressing it so. This voice is a human, a man, and he’s speaking to me.

I don’t understand all the words. My ears can hear, but my mind can’t take in what he’s saying as fast as he’s saying it.

“Guy-Manuel.”

He says that one a lot. In fact, it seems to be all he’s really saying. I don’t know what’s going on, but this man is smiling and holding my face so gently that I assumed his fingers were the breeze. 

I’m not scared anymore.

This man is important to me. This man, while I can’t see more than fuzzy memories, is very close to me. I know I had lost him, to what was a literal and not eternity ago, and I am happy from that alone. I know I had lost this man, but have him back. I need no details of a memory to know that the sight of his face made me happy. I didn’t need to understand the past of my existence to know that I wasn’t scared anymore.

Because he is here.

My mouth is open and my tongue clicks awkwardly against my teeth. A sound soon comes out, but it’s so pulled and muffled that I don’t even completely understand it. It is a foreign sound using foreign tools, but yet--

“Thomas,” --but yet it makes the man smile. After a moment, the thought comes to me that it is his name, that Guy-Manuel is my name. 

“Guy-Manuel,” he repeats, lips moving and cheeks red. His face is wet too, just like mine. “Guy-Manuel.” I smile. My name. That is my name. 

The memories begin to grow clear. I can remember things. I can remember fire. I can remember sadness. 

I can remember death.

I look to Thomas above me. I remember death and yet he is holding me, and I am here. I remember sadness, and yet I cannot find any emotion within me other than joy. But perhaps that is the truth of it, that I shouldn’t need to think about it. Perhaps even I shouldn’t try to find reason where none needs to be found. 

I look to Thomas and my smile grows even wider. 

“I am alive,” I whisper, and I can understand my words. I can understand their meaning, my thoughts, and everything between that. I understand that I wasn’t alive before, and that even before that I existed in a form I never would have called living. I remember my body of metal and circuits, of lights and electricity. I remember it all. “We are alive, Thomas.”

Blessed beauty exists for us, and pain and misery are but memories that still sharpen in my head, tucked away in a time that served only as a gateway into who we both are now. Thomas pulls me close, his arms around my upper body so tightly that I can hear his heartbeat. It mingles with my own, a symphony and conversation between the two idle souls that had existed together but in eternities apart. They beat almost as one.

Thump…Thump...Thump…Thump…

My name is Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.

I am alive.

And I am human.


End file.
